Much crisper Google Earth

"The Landsat 7 satellite suffered a hardware failure early in its life
that introduced striped artifacts into all of its images. By analyzing a
large number of images we were able to virtually eliminate these
stripes, as well as clouds and other atmospheric effects. The process
was very similar to how we produced the global time-lapse imagery of the earth that we released last month."

"Mining data from a large number of Landsat images of each area allowed
us to reconstruct cloud-free imagery even in tropical regions that are
always at least partly cloudy."

"We prioritized recent data when it was available, so this update also
includes refreshed imagery in many regions of the world, especially in
areas where high-resolution imagery is not available, including parts of
Russia, Indonesia, and central Africa."